Spring is just around the corner, but this year’s flu season is still clinging on and causing misery for millions of people in the northern hemisphere.
Not only have more people succumbed to the illness than this time last year, but the symptoms seem to have been more unpleasant and longer lasting.
Those affected may take comfort from the fact that the official view is that it has been a bad year for flu.
The season normally starts dropping off around now, but across Europe, an ‘intense influenza season’ has been exacerbated by a simultaneous epidemic of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV – a common cause of coughs and colds), according to the latest update from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control – with people potentially suffering from both.
It’s a similar story across the Atlantic: the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention classified this flu season as ‘high severity’ for all age groups; doctors’ appointments for flu symptoms and hospitalisations have reached the highest levels in 15 years, since the 2009/2010 swine flu outbreak. So what’s driving this?
Multiple factors are to blame, says John Oxford, an emeritus professor of virology at Queen Mary University of London, who worked for the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) World Influenza Centre in London in the 1980s.
These factors include the rain (more on that later). Certainly one of them may well be the sting in the tail of the Covid pandemic.
‘SARS coronavirus, which causes Covid, was like the big beast in the jungle for a few years but its dominance has now waned as effective vaccines make it much less prevalent and deadly,’ says Professor Oxford.
Spring is just around the corner, but this year’s flu season is still clinging on and causing misery for millions of people in the northern hemisphere
‘So that has left a gap which the other winter respiratory viruses, including flu and RSV, are filling.’
Covid is also indirectly to blame, adds Professor Andrew Easton, a virologist at the University of Warwick. He believes that isolating during lockdowns, and wearing masks in public and keeping a safe distance from each other, may have contributed to lowered immunity against flu bugs.
‘There is a possibility that over two years of not encountering flu and other respiratory infections [there is] reduced general immunity to these viruses even now.’
It doesn’t help that there’s been a low uptake of the flu vaccine in the UK, the US and elsewhere. Around half of patients aged six months to 65 years in clinically at-risk groups have been vaccinated for a number of years in England: similarly, less than half (46 per cent) of adults and children had the vaccine in the 2024/2025 season in the US.
‘Flu vaccinations are one of the best ways we know to limit the spread of influenza and reduce the severity of symptoms,’ says Professor Easton.
‘It’s hard to know why so many people are not taking up the offer of a flu jab but it’s fair to say that there is a high degree of distrust towards all vaccination programmes, generated by misinformation on social media and elsewhere.
‘Unfortunately, official statements underlining vaccine safety are often ignored.’
The weather may also have caused flu rates to rise, as months of rain and freezing temperatures kept more of us indoors for long periods of time.
.Multiple factors are to blame, says John Oxford (left), an emeritus professor of virology at Queen Mary University of London – including the rain. Covid is also indirectly to blame, adds Professor Andrew Easton (right)
‘This is what viruses love and could have pushed up infection rates,’ says Professor Easton.
According to the Met Office, northern Scotland recorded its third-wettest three-day period between December 29 and 31.
Meanwhile, December 31 was the second-wettest day on record in North-West England and North Wales, just a snapshot of a dreary damp season that seems to have gone on and on.
Flu symptoms have been particularly nasty, according to anecdotal reports, which could be down to the fact that people are coming down with more than one respiratory ailment at a time.
‘It is possible to be infected with multiple viruses at the same time but it is rare,’ says Ron Eccles, an emeritus professor of virology at Cardiff University. ‘More likely, some unlucky people, who may already be run down so their immune system is compromised, can fall ill with the three infections, one after the other.
‘So, for example, they could fall sick with RSV, and clear the infection, then succumb to seasonal flu, get ill and clear the infection, and finally get Covid – all in a matter of a few weeks.
‘That’s very debilitating and you would feel pretty awful.’
RSV, which accounts for 450,000 GP appointments, 30,000 hospitalisations and 80 deaths of babies and children even in a ‘normal’ year, could be much more serious if someone is already battling Covid and/or flu, says Professor Eccles.
(XEC, a variant of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron strain first reported last May, has been one of the most prevalent variants of Covid around the world this season, with symptoms including a high temperature, aches and pains, tiredness and a cough or sore throat. RSV causes symptoms including a runny nose and congestion, a reduced appetite, coughing, sneezing and a fever.)
‘Don’t underestimate RSV, which is a serious and widespread pathogen every winter mainly in children but also can cause a nasty infection in the elderly,’ says Professor Eccles. RSV is responsible for around one in six of hospital admissions of babies and children in the UK: 6 per cent will need intensive care.
There have been questions, too, about how effective this year’s flu jab has been.
According to the Oxford Vaccine Group, based at Oxford University, the flu vaccine ‘works better in some years than others’.
It says: ‘Across all age groups including children, the flu vaccine prevented between 15 to 52 per cent of flu cases between 2015 to 2020.’
This year’s vaccine may also have been a bit on the low side in terms of effectiveness: while the UK Health Security Agency is yet to publish the results, in the southern hemisphere, which had its flu season earlier this year, it was effective for around one third of patients (34.5 per cent).
The good news is that a new class of more effective influenza vaccines is on the horizon, based on technology developed during the pandemic.
MRNA vaccines trigger cells to produce copies of a protein on the outside of the coronavirus (the ‘spike protein’), rendering it harmless; the process to develop the annual flu vaccine takes months: mRNA vaccines can be manufactured in a fraction of the time.
Pharmaceutical company Moderna is about to start testing an mRNA vaccine for flu in a large trial.
Professor Oxford says these new mRNA flu vaccines, which could be available to patients in less than two years, will be game-changers.
Professor Easton agrees they’re ‘attractive’ and could be cheaper and faster to make.
‘But whether they’re any more effective at reducing rates of infection is still debatable,’ he says. ‘These vaccines have worked very well with Covid and may be better all round, but they still rely on us having the knowledge of influenza strains that are circulating globally, and that means multinational collaboration.’
And this is significant right now. Every February, the WHO predicts which strains present the greatest threat over the next winter, after which it’s a race (taking six months or more) to produce the millions of doses needed globally.
Its decisions are based on global surveillance data and samples from national labs analysed at the WHO collaborating centres, which are in the US, China, Russia, UK, Japan and Australia.
But the US is intending to pull out of the WHO, although influenza surveillance centres in the US are still sharing their data on incidence – for now – taking part in a WHO meeting at the Francis Crick Institute in London last week to discuss flu vaccine composition.
‘That’s a relief but it’s still concerning that, in the future, the US may not be collaborating as closely with the WHO in the global project to monitor strains of flu,’ says Professor Oxford.
‘Although there are 151 national labs across 127 countries, we do need data from the US too and I’m hoping that they will change their minds.’
Meanwhile, what can you do to protect yourself? It’s too late to have a vaccine, but there are things you can do to make sure you don’t get a last hurrah flu bug.
‘Simple hygiene measures are very effective – this means washing your hands using soap and water at regular intervals,’ says Professor Oxford.
‘Also virus particles can invade the body through the tear ducts and conjunctiva, so avoid rubbing your eyes with your hands, which can transmit infection.
‘And go and enjoy the Spring sunshine. Bugs hate fresh air.’
I’ve NEVER felt this ill. Why didn’t I get the jab?
By Ailsa Leslie
I’ve never had the flu vaccine. This is not a mistake I plan to make again.
Despite reading about the winter crisis in the NHS and having an 18-month-old who acts as a honeypot for illnesses, I had assumed I was untouchable.
As a healthy 37-year-old, I rarely get sick, and certainly for no longer than a few days at a time.
I haven’t been significantly ill since a brush with Covid a few years ago. And after a childhood in rural Scotland, I consider myself pretty tough.
Honestly I assumed the flu was just something hypochondriacs branded a bad cold to justify some extra days in bed. So when my daughter came home from nursery with a hacking cough and high temperature, I thought nothing of it.
My partner Chris was lumbered with all of the childcare, despite also being sick, writes AILSA LESLIE
Then when I picked up this cough and temperature, I assumed it would be gone in a few days (my toddler, with the mysterious immune system of a child, had thrown hers off fast).
I took a Lemsip and headed into work – where the rasping, unending cough became so bad, a colleague I share an office with moved out. Beads of sweat ran down my face during a meeting and I had to ask another colleague to accompany me on the walk out of the office as I headed home because I feared I’d faint.
That evening, my temperature hit 40 degrees. I couldn’t eat or focus on a book or screen.
Going to bed wasn’t much better: I was sweating through T-shirts, alternately boiling and freezing, and my limbs were so sore that I had to sleep with my legs steepled, waking every 40 minutes to cough miserably.
‘Death would be preferable,’ I moaned to my partner Chris (who nodded charitably in agreement – despite also being sick, he’d been lumbered with all of the childcare).
During the six unending days of this, I had plenty of time to rue not having the vaccine. As an asthmatic, I’m even eligible to get it for free.
So why didn’t I? Ignorance, partly, of just how terrible flu is.
I’m also, embarrassingly, quite scared of needles – like an estimated 10 per cent of people. After gritting my teeth though multiple jabs during pregnancy and a three-day birth, I had decided not to have another injection.
Of course, this now seems utterly foolish. The flu has passed, but I still feel so weak, my voice is a croak and I can’t taste or smell anything.
Next year I’ll be front of the queue for a jab. I never want to have this again.
